Principal Site Reliability Engineer / Hybrid

Principal Site Reliability Engineer
An established fintech institution is seeking a Principal Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) to apply software engineering and systems engineering best practices to ensure the stability, scalability, and overall health of critical production services. This full-time position is hybrid, with 3 days on-site in Downtown Chicago and 2 days remote.
This is a highly influential Principal-level role with significant impact on engineering and reliability strategy. This role collaborates with engineering and technology teams to build reliable, scalable, and observable systems throughout their lifecycle. The Principal SRE leads technical initiatives across the enterprise by leveraging data-driven engineering, automation, and strong architectural expertise to solve complex challenges and align teams around scalable solutions.
Required Skills & Experience

• 15+ years of professional experience in Software Engineering, Site Reliability Engineering, Systems Engineering, Cloud/Platform Engineering, DevOps, or Infrastructure Engineering.
• Strong leadership capabilities including the ability to mentor junior engineers and the capacity to drive architecture decisions and influence technical direction.
• The ability to operates with significant autonomy across the organization's most consequential reliability challenges.
• Proven track record of using objective analysis and technical expertise to validate assumptions, assess risks, and guide engineering decisions

Desired Skills & Experience

• AWS/Cloud experience
• C++ experience
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Computer Engineering, or Information Systems
• Experience in the Security, Payments, or Financial Services industries

What You Will Be Doing
Tech Breakdown

• Languages/scripting: Java, Python
• Containers/clusters: Kubernetes
• IaC: Terraform
• Observability/monitoring: Datadog, Grafana
• OS: Linux

Daily Responsibilities

• Apply automation, DevOps, and software engineering best practices to improve how services are built, deployed, monitored, and maintained.
• Use data and analysis to identify reliability risks, validate solutions, and guide technical decisions.
• Define and enhance service reliability metrics, objectives, and performance standards.
• Improve system observability through monitoring, logging, tracing, alerting, and dashboards.
• Drive continuous improvements in CI/CD, Infrastructure as Code, automation, testing, incident response, and system reliability.
• Identify recurring production issues and implement long-term improvements in code, architecture, tooling, and operational processes.

The Offer
This role is bonus eligible.
You will receive the following benefits:

• Competitive medical (PPO and HDHP), dental, and vision insurance, plus employer contributions to Health Savings Accounts (HSA) and Flexible Spending Accounts (FSA) for healthcare, commuting, and dependent care expenses.
• Dollar-for-dollar 401(k) match on the first 6% of employee contributions, available upon eligibility.
• Flexible Time Off (FTO) for salaried employees, generous PTO for hourly employees, 11 paid company holidays, and a paid volunteer day.
• Up to 12 weeks of paid parental leave to support growing families.
• Access to Maven's comprehensive family planning benefits, including fertility treatments, egg freezing, adoption, surrogacy, pregnancy and postpartum care, pediatric support, and return-to-work resources.

Applicants must be currently authorized to work in the US on a full-time basis now and in the future.